Welcome back to Project Runway, where the concepts are high (“clocks”), the commitment to the concepts is low (“I mean…. probably clocks”), and the entire flow of production depends on the mood of a single, volatile, terribly troubled gay Ryan Reynolds. When Joshua McKinley decides it would behoove his reality character development to buck up and start treating his fellow designers like humans, all is well. This happens once per episode. The rest of the time – watch out.

This week the contestants competed in the HP and Intel Challenge, which involved running their grubby fingers all over some “touchsmart desktops” and attempting to reason with printers that just won’t work (if you’re over 50). Also, they had to create a textile design from scratch, film a video to serve as the backdrop for their fashion shows, choose music, learn from Betsey Johnson how to do a wobbly cartwheel without your weave falling out, etc. Basically they had to produce their own runway events. Quite a tall order for the short-fused.

Of course, Bert was the last to be picked. While Heidi pretended to faint out of embarrassment for him, I wondered – if Joshua hadn’t been pulled first from Heidi’s wizard hat of tricks, would anyone have picked him to be on his or her team? I guess Anya or Laura might have. But it’s become increasingly laughable that even though Bert’s supposed to be the uncooperative curmudgeon to avoid, it’s Joshua who can derail an entire challenge simply by picking a meaningless fight and sashaying into different rooms so that people have to come comfort him OVER NOTHING.

The teams named themselves Chaos and Nuts and Bolts, which was actually really confusing – these names each made perfect sense, but for the opposite team. Last week’s challenge winner Anthony Ryan, along with Anya, Bryce, Viktor, and Olivier, called themselves Chaos and were favorably presented in a soft-focus, slow-motion montage of them laughing and having fun. Anthony even came down with a severe case of the “sh*ts and giggles” because he used to work in graphic design. Meanwhile, Joshua, Kimberly, Becky, Bert, and the love child of Betsey Johnson and Oscar de la Renta (Laura) (she wishes) stood around glaring at each other and waiting for Joshua’s next move. Things got so scary, they were even considering creating designs for five female versions of the Village People. God, I wish they’d done that. “Stop saying ‘fireman’ or I’m gonna keep thinking it, LAURA!” will definitely be haunting me for awhile. Why turn on your last remaining ally like that? And a fireman Village Person is totally plausible. If she’d still been on that “sea amoeba” kick, then I can see him getting upset.